8.10.2005

The Dream Machine, 2005

Every year, Maximum PC magazine puts together its "Dream Machine". It's the most powerful PC that you can build with off-the-shelf components. This year's machine has quite impressive specs, including:

Over a billion transistors in all. The machine costs almost $13,000 when you include the case, power supply, dual monitors and speakers.

You read the article and you think, "My God, this is an insane amount of computing power and disk space! Who could possibly need such a machine?!" But then you look back at the first Dream Machine that they built in 1996. That machine had:

A screaming 200 MHz Pentium 1

32 MB of RAM

A 2 GB hard disk.

They didn't even have a "3D graphics card" in it, because 3D graphics cards didn't exist yet.

Just 9 years ago that was an insanely expensive ass-kicking machine. Today this 9-year-old Dream Macine is so pathetic that it would be unusable. 32 MB of RAM??? You could not even launch the OS in that.

So... Between 1996 and 2005 -- just 9 years -- disk space increased by a factor of 1,000. RAM increased by a factor of 250. CPU clock speed increased by a factor of 11, there are 4 cores instead of 1 and the number of transistors went up by a factor of 150. And now we have incredibly powerful graphics cards holding 300 million transistors -- a technology that did not even exist 9 years ago in the normal PC marketplace.

Project out 10 years from now, to 2015. It is quite likely that the $13,000 "Dream Machine" of 2005 will seem pathetic and unusable. You won't even be able to buy a machine like this because it is so pathetic. The 2015 Dream Machine will have:

2 petabytes of disk space.

2 terabytes of RAM.

65 billion transistors in the CPUs. They will be clocked at 25 GHz and there will be 16 cores (or maybe there will be 200 cores clocked at 5 GHz).

Who knows what the graphics cards in 2015 will be doing.

Will the machine in 2015 contain a vision processing card??? That is the huge question I have. 3D graphics accelerator cards like we see today did not even exist in 1996 as far as the Dream Machine was concerned. Will we see vision processing cards arise from nothing and explode in power like that? Or will it take ten years more?

What will the robots in 2015 be able to do?

And what will the Dream Machines in 2025 look like? I don't think we can imagine it.

"They didn't even have a "graphics card" in it, because graphics cards didn't exist yet." Erm, yes they did. Graphics cards have been used ever since the original IBM PC. It is only later that video functions started getting integrated into motherboards. 1996 was also the year the voodoo 1 3d accelerated graphics card was released, and nVidia had a card out in 1995. It would be more accurate to say that in 1996 3d accelerated graphics cards were not a mainstream piece of hardware.

"Project out 10 years from now, to 2015." Continuing the rapid development of computer power will eventually have to hit a few laws of diminishing returns eventually. IMHO transistor density will have a really hard time to continue as it has, it's hard to see how many fabs a market can sustain when they cost billions of dollars each.

Also, those limits are in 2D density. 3D storage and chips should become more common.

As for the vision card, let me just say that "people" are working on it. It will have a suite of hardware-implemented algorithms, some more simple than others. For instance, SVD is a common linear algebra technique used in machine learning and computer vision. t is sort of a building block, but isn't that fast for large matrices. A hardware implementation should be thousands of times faster.

This doesn't just mean live computation will be faster. It also means training a vision algorithm can be done, perhaps, in hours or days, in place of weeks or months. That's huge as far as something equally important to Moore's law: the advance of algorithms. Shorter test time means more iterations and improvements in the same span of time.

"'They didn't even have a "graphics card" in it, because graphics cards didn't exist yet.' Erm, yes they did. Graphics cards have been used ever since the original IBM PC. "

Did you intentionally misquote him to prove a point or was it something else? The original article said "They didn't even have a '3D graphics card' in it, because 3D graphics cards didn't exist yet."

For the average person, 3D graphics cards were about as common in 1996 as add-on physics cards are today.

"...it's hard to see how many fabs a market can sustain when they cost billions of dollars each."

They cost that much already, but AMD, Intel, and IBM are still building them. Why? Because of the economies of scale. It's extremely economical to spend that much on a facility when each year they make more and more money off of processors that become increasingly cheaper to manufacure. As long as someone can make money off of it, it'll be done. And I don't see any point in the future where the need for processors taper's off.

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